June 10 to June 4: The Week of the Defense Budget, Tali Gottlieb, the Kashrut Reform and the Bank of Israel
Defense spending is a bottomless pit. Seventeen hours of blows between Israel and Iran this week cost the Israeli taxpayer no less than half a billion shekels. That enormous sum financed the interceptor missiles launched at the ballistic missiles the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired toward Israel, and the air-to-ground missiles launched in response by Air Force planes at targets in Iran. Since the second Iran war broke out at the end of February, it has cost Israel about 47 billion shekels, and this does not appear to be the final figure. Every day of the “ceasefire” that United States President Donald Trump is imposing on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu costs Israel about 100 to 130 million shekels, and the IDF warns that it will not be able to carry out all of its missions in the many burning arenas if the defense budget is not urgently updated again, this time to the astronomical and unprecedented sum of 188 billion shekels. Wars are expensive, and the treasury that records every bullet and every bomb is already running dry. When the country repeatedly goes to the same wars without setting sensible goals and a coherent strategy, they become bleeding, impoverishing troubles. No one will be surprised if 2026 ends with a defense budget that crosses the 200 billion shekel mark. Israeli citizens will pay this price for years to come. // Yuval Azoulay
Tali Gottlieb, backing against the state
Like other security-related affairs such as the Bild, Qatargate and the submarines case, the disclosure of the identity of a senior Shin Bet official by MK Tali Gottlieb is also a clear example of harm to state security. But as in the other cases mentioned, this is a unique kind of harm, one whose perpetrators receive immediate political backing because they are part of the government. Never before have so many full-throated right-wingers supported harming their own country simply because those responsible are their representatives in the government and the Knesset. This week it was the coalition representatives on the House Committee who came to Gottlieb’s defense in the hearing on lifting her immunity. Gottlieb explained why she endangered the Shin Bet officer’s life, because he was the partner of Shikma Bressler, whom she believes led refusal to serve that weakened the state, and also because, in her conspiratorial view, the Shin Bet concealed the threat of Hamas’ murderous attack from the prime minister. But the story is much simpler. Gottlieb knowingly endangered the life of a Shin Bet officer simply because he is the partner of a protest activist. Along the way she also showed how shaky her grasp of reality is when she insisted that reports about the alleged conspiracy she attributed to Bressler’s partner are absolutely true because they appeared on a crazy website. None of her friends thought there was anything wrong with her actions, and if they did, they kept quiet. This is what the Israeli right looks like a few months before the elections. And all for Gottlieb’s primaries and Netanyahu’s evasion of responsibility. // Moshe Gorali
The kashrut reform, a needed blitz change
In a last-minute rush, the coalition is advancing for Shas the bill to cancel the kashrut reform. The reform was supposed to create competition and reduce the cost of living. Calculations by Calcalist show that the cost of the kashrut market reaches about 5 billion shekels a year, of which about 1 billion stems directly from the monopoly of the Chief Rabbinate. The bill to cancel the reform is not intended to block secular or Reform kashrut supervision. Its main purpose is to block the kashrut certification of Tzohar rabbis, an Orthodox rabbis’ organization that offers an alternative to the Chief Rabbinate. This is further proof that the legislation has nothing to do with halakha and is only about jobs and power. Today there are about 5,000 kashrut supervisors, and Shas wants to ensure it continues to control this pool of jobs. The mistake made by the reform’s initiator, former minister Matan Kahana, was that he gave the kashrut system a year to prepare for the changes, and by the time they were supposed to take effect, the government had fallen. In the next government of change, it will need to be implemented again at lightning speed. // Shahar Ilan
Bank of Israel reporting to the treasury is not optional
The Bank of Israel announced this week that it intervened in foreign exchange trading and bought 801 million dollars. The intervention was not intended to affect the dollar exchange rate, but to ensure the proper functioning of the foreign exchange market. Almost incidentally, it became clear that the bank does not routinely update the finance minister about foreign exchange purchases, contrary to the law’s instructions. This is not a conspiracy, but a long-standing norm under which it is customary to settle for a verbal update in a meeting between the minister and the governor. Even so, it is important to remember that the Bank of Israel Law is a work of craftsmanship designed to ensure the central bank’s independence for years to come, and for that reason it is right and proper that the bank comply with the law’s instruction to the letter and strictly. Give Caesar what is Caesar’s, these are exactly the things that ensure the bank’s independence. // Shlomo Teitelbaum
Between good compensation and bad compensation, we have stumbled into the spectrum of routine compensation
The compensation games in the Iran, Hezbollah, Israel triangle once again showed that for most Israelis, compensation is not a spectrum. It will always be either the very best or the very worst. Reward the good, or take revenge on the enemies. Soldiers and reservists receive compensation, soldiers and reservists go out on reprisal operations. It is always local, special benefits for those who serve, for example, help them a little, but do not solve the problem of burnout and do not address the structural problem of the manpower shortage in the Israeli army. And those reprisal operations in the 1950s were, in the long term, meaningless, and did not really stop attacks on us. A small gift or a small revenge, they are always swallowed up in the bigger picture. In that sense, all the compensation from one end or the other is actually similar to all the compensation in the middle, the kind hidden in all sorts of unclear lines on the payslip or pension statement. Gray, routine, automatic, and we have little idea what it means. And like salary or pension, the Iranian, Lebanese and Israeli compensation also becomes an almost transparent routine, but accumulates in the Israeli reservoir of distress, the mental “savings” that anyone trying to live here is forced to build up. // Dor Saar-Man
